One day in November, 1963, Roger Vaughan heard an unusual series of dings outside his cubicle of an office at Saturday Evening Post headquarters in Philadelphia. One-thirty or two in the afternoon, an “absolutely do not disturb” meeting underway in the managing editor’s office down the empty hallway, and the dinging persisted.

“It was the Associated Press machine. Whenever a news item came in it sounded a couple of dings. If it was a bigger story, a few more dings. But In this case the dinging just kept going off,” remembers Vaughan.

He picked up the narrow strip of yellow paper with a single line of typing streaming out of the machine, spilling onto the floor: “The president has been shot in Dallas.”

Vaughan knew the story was bigger than the do-not-disturb edict. Hustling down the hallway, he opened the door to the editor’s office, saw the look of a man about to bite his head off, spurted out the news, and then found himself gathering up the tools of his dawning journalistic trade and boarding the next plane to Dallas to get the story.

“I was in the police station when Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated John F. Kennedy,” said Vaughan. “I didn’t see the shot but I definitely heard it.” Moments like these seer into the minds of journalists and writers, by nature keen observers.

At 26 and electrified, listening, questioning, heading into the eye of history’s storm to report and write, Vaughan felt the unique sensation that set its hook firmly and has never let him go.

“I’ve never done anything as satisfying as writing,” he said in a recent interview.

Vaughan will share stories like these and many more when he takes to a TV studio-like stage on the patio of the Oxford Community Center at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 28. His friend and sailing associate Tot O’Mara will play the interviewing role. The two long-time Oxford residents – O’Mara lifelong and Vaughan 41 years – promise an entertaining session with a good sound system.

“I did a couple of Zoom interviews during the pandemic about a recent book I wrote on the 2010 America’s Cup, when two catamarans squared off against each other for the first time. It’s called Learning To Fly. I found the interview format one that I could understand.”

Vaughan plans to share his perspectives on what writing is all about and aspects of “the eccentric life I’ve managed to have.”

Over the many decades since his flight to Dallas, Vaughan has inserted himself into history’s excitement to cultivate the difficult career he carved out for himself as journalist, novelist, documentarian and screenwriter. “I probably couldn’t do it again,” he said. “So much has changed with social media. Everybody’s writing now, nobody’s reading. But I’ve always had to write. Who knows what bad things I might have done if I didn’t have writing? It’s a great outlet – better than a psychiatrist. I think it was Joe Cocker who said that if he couldn’t sing, he probably would have killed somebody.”

Vaughan has constantly collected material along the way; enough to fill 18 published books – fiction and non-fiction – countless magazine interviews and newspaper articles, screenplays and television docudramas. The wisdom he has acquired along the way, he says, is a compilation of what he has learned from the many accomplished people he has interviewed and reported on.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have been with these people I write about.”

After sailing dinghies competitively with Ted Turner while both were students at Brown, Vaughan later called his college friend and began orbiting the media magnate as he climbed into sailing’s most competitive ranks on his way to an America’s Cup victory. “I spent a lot of time with him. I’ve never known a person who could be such a complete jerk and then, a few minutes later, become a brilliant genius.”

A docudrama he has written called The Man Behind The Mouth focuses on Turner’s exploits along with sailing guru Gary Jobson. “Jobson was the man behind the mouth, Turner’s mouth,” said Vaughan. “Turner wouldn’t have won the America’s Cup without him. The question was could Jobson weather Turner’s fame. He was outrageous, always in your face, a big womanizer. Could Jobson survive being attached to Turner’s personality?”

Big, big egos.

Vaughan found famed Berlin Philharmonic conductor and music director Herbert von Karajan a member of the same club. “I’ve never seen such ego. He told me that he didn’t drive a Porsche because it was a great car. It was a great car because he owned one.”

Ukrainian sailor and coach Victor Kovalenko, now head coach of the Australian Olympic sailing team, is another larger-than-life figure Vaughan has spent time with, written about and learned from.

“His sailing teams have won more gold medals than any other sailing teams in history. He believes that to excel at sport, you have to excel at life. He always tries to get the best out of his sailors.

“One Olympic sailor he coaches told me about a day he was having a bad regatta – an 18th and a 12th. He was feeling down, feeling badly. He spoke with Kovalenko. The coach told him: ‘You mustn’t forget how good you are.’ That turned him around. I keep that on a sticky note on my computer. It’s a useful thing to remember.

“Kovalenko believes that smoothing out the rest of your life will help in sports. Sailors may reach a high level of physical performance, balance, boat skills and diet but leaving wife, kids and friends behind to become an Olympic sailor is not a good way to proceed. He really is a life coach with a specialty in sailing.”

Now having downsized from Oxford to a smaller home in Easton, Vaughan considers himself lucky to be living through the times that he is. He started his literary career during the great social, cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s: A time when sex, drugs and rock and roll erupted through the Earth’s cultural crust, when touring with and writing about Bob Dylan eventually led Vaughan to settle on the Eastern Shore with his wife Kip Requardt in the home of a close friend who attended University of Virginia with Dylan, and a time when Timothy Leary’s concert-like events touting psychedelics enabled Vaughan to write an unpublished book – “we all have them” – about California’s Silicon Valley including how the hallucinogen psilocybin seeped into the Stanford University curriculum.

At 84 and counting, Vaughan continues to follow the passion that gives him so much satisfaction. “I’ve produced a lot lately. The Turner and Jobson docudrama and a full script for an Aaron Burr television docudrama. And I’ve just had a novel published called Coming About. It’s available on Amazon. Fiction. It first appeared as a month-by-month serial in the Tidewater Times. Dickens and Mailer did serials. That seemed like a pretty hot shit thing to do. Took me 21 episodes to complete. Three thousand to four thousand words per episode.

“Focuses on a kid struggling with his identity and an around-the-world sailing race forced on him by his father. I’m told it’s a pretty quick read. There’s love interest, some pretty bad people and intense blue water sailing.”

If that weren’t enough, Vaughan also has a memoir in the works. “It’s a little too much. I guess I shouldn’t have done so much. But I think I’ll do the memoir as a novel, a little on the inventive side. I think that’s OK, as long as it’s not too outrageous, as long as it’s something that could have happened.”

Some call that artistic license.

Vaughan went into dark mode when commenting on the immediate times in which we find ourselves.

“It’s like a big cloud over my head every single morning. What bad news will there be today? You don’t think it can get any worse and it does. But I have to keep up; it’s what I do. I read and read and analyze and assess. I don’t get how people can think there are your facts and there are my facts. Sometimes I think human nature is close to the end. Climate change, wildfires, stronger and stronger storms. Very scary. Man is truly a self-destructive being.”

On Tuesday, Sept. 28th at 5:30pm, The Oxford Community Center is set to transform the side patio into a TV talk show set to share a conversation with Tot O’Mara and Roger Vaughan with audiences. Bring your lawn-chair and a fleece, to enjoy this intimate chat with an amazing man, author, adventurer and neighbor. Beverages will be available for purchase. Please go here for ticket information. 

Dennis Forney grew up on the Chester River in Chestertown. After graduating Oberlin College, he returned to the Shore where he wrote for the Queen Anne’s Record Observer, the Bay Times, the Star Democrat, and the Watermen’s Gazette. He moved to Lewes, Delaware in 1975 with his wife Becky where they lived for 45 years, raising their family and enjoying the saltwater life. Forney and Trish Vernon founded the Cape Gazette, a community newspaper serving eastern Sussex County, in 1993, where he served as publisher until 2020. He continues to write for the Cape Gazette as publisher emeritus and expanded his Delmarva footprint in 2020 with a move to Bozman in Talbot County. 

Autumn officially began this week on Wednesday, September 22 and will end on December 21. It is the season of harvest, and is associated with abundance, maturity, change. It is the season of pumpkins, apples, grapes and cornucopias. Depictions associated with the months and seasons of the year were included in illuminated manuscripts beginning in the Middle Ages. Individual paintings representing the seasons were few until the 18th Century.

Italian artist Guiseppe Archimboldo (1526/27 to 1593) served as court portrait painter to the Austrian Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor’s Ferdinand I in Vienna, and Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II in Prague. Archimboldo dutifully painted portraits in the traditional manner. However, he collaborated with humanist poet Giovanni Baptista Fonteo to create art works to glorify the expanding Hapsburg empire. The Hapsburg’s welcomed all distinguished scholars of the day and encouraged learning. The vision was to create a utopia on earth. To achieve this goal, Archimboldo created a new and unique themes in many of his paintings.

“Autumn” (1573) (30” x 25’’) is one of The Four Seasons series Archimboldo offered in 1569 to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II. The set was accompanied by a poem by Fonteo. “Autumn” is portrayed as a mature male with a face of apples and pears, a pomegranate chin, and a mushroom ear with a fig earring. His lips are chestnuts; his beard, eyebrows, and mustache are wheat. His neck consists of pears and root vegetables, and it rises from a broken wooden slat barrel tied with willow branches. His curly hair is bunches of grapes and his hat is a pumpkin. Archimboldo created a potpourri of a fruits and vegetables of the season to stimulate the taste, smell, touch and sight of the viewer. The Four Seasons were intended to recognize the abundance, peace, and glory of the Hapsburg empire. This set was so well received that Maximillian had a copy made for a gift to Augustus of Saxony.

Archimboldo painted fruits and vegetables of the Autumn season. However, the variety of golds, oranges and reds of Fall foliage also come to mind. Landscapes began as the principal subject for Protestant Dutch painters of the 17th Century. However, it is the French Impressionist who stimulate a viewer’s sense of sight. Camille Pissarro offers spectacular Autumn views. He and his family moved from Paris to the suburbs of Louveciennes where they lived from 1869 to 1872.
“Landscape at Louvecinnes, Autumn” (1870) (35’’ x 43’’) is a subject Pissarro painted often. He was an early proponent of painting in plein air (outdoors), and thus was able to capture the color and light in nature. In the painting, a woman with a bucket has stopped to talk with a school boy carrying his satchel. It is early Fall; some tree leaves are just beginning to turn, and rows of green plants are ready for harvest. The French village of Louveciennes is peaceful under a blue sky tinged with the gray tones of Autumn.

In “Trees on a Hill, Autumn, Landscape in Louvencinnes” (1872) the trees wear brilliant golds, oranges, and reds leaves. The trunks are brown and dark blue-black. Leaves have fallen to the ground and the blue sky has changed to a chilly light grey. His understanding and rendering of the color and light found in nature is obvious. He enjoyed painting the scenes outside his door and the common folk in his village neighborhood throughout the seasons of the year.

Pissarro was older than most of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists painters, and he served as a mentor and father figure to them. His influence on the development and spread of Impressionism was acknowledged by many of them and his advice was eagerly sought. He recommended: “Work at the same time on sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis… Don’t be afraid of putting on color… Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.”

In “Grove of Chestnut Trees at Louvecinnes” (1872), Pissarro depicts Autumn drawing to a close and the leaves have fallen from the trees. The harvest is finished, with the exception of chestnuts the last of Autumn’s abundance. Several tall and sturdy chestnut trees stand in the cold winter sunlight. Pissarro uses a sharp chartreuse paint to create a harsh chill on the earth. In the shadows rusts and golds are used. Autumn is also the season of change and maturity. One large chestnut trunk is split and will fall to the earth. The trees life and usefulness will continue as it is recycled into lumber for building.

Chestnut trees have a symbolic history representing fertility, abundance and longevity. They were cultivated in ancient Greece over 3000 years ago, and have been recognized as a reliable and abundant food source even since. Chestnut trees live from 200 to 800 years and they grow from 60 feet to 200 feet tall. The nuts have medicinal as well as nutritional value; the nuts are abundant and can be stored for a long time. The wood of the tree is hard and is used for construction.

Chestnuts can be eaten raw or roasted, which brings to mind the change of seasons from Autumn to Winter, when roasted chestnuts are enjoyed by so many.
Louveciennes was the Pissarro family home until 1872. The Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) interrupted their stay. They fled to England. Pissarro was forced to leave behind 1500 paintings made over the period of 20 years. When he returned in 1872, he found the studio had been used to quarter Prussian soldiers. They had destroyed all but 40 paintings. Fortunately, he was not discouraged and continued to paint until his death in 1903. He participated in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 until 1886. Pissarro’s words are hardly adequate to sum up his enormous contributions to art, but he was at heart a simple man: “Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” “God takes care of imbeciles, little children, and artists.”

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.